Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

by N.T. Wright

The theme of ‘new creation’ that permeates the resurrection narratives of chapters 20 and 21 answers to the biblical promises in the Psalms and Isaiah of the new world to be born once the dark anti-creation forces have been defeated. The same picture emerges dramatically from Colossians. The great poem in chapter 1 brings together two moments, ‘creation’ and ‘reconciliation’, without explaining either why ‘reconciliation’ was necessary or, in any detail, how it was accomplished (by ‘the blood of his cross’ is the only hint). Thus the opening statement of creation-through-the-image, the passage read by the Prime Minister at the Coronation, is set in poetic parallel to the statement of reconciliation: He is the image of God, the invisible one, The firstborn of all creation, For in him all things were created, In the heavens and here on the earth. Things we can see and things we cannot – Thrones and lordships and rulers and powers – All things were created both through him and for him . . . He is the start of it all, Firstborn from realms of the dead; So in all things he might be the chief. For in him all the Fullness was glad to dwell And through him to reconcile all to himself, Making peace through the blood of his cross, Through him – yes, things on the earth, And also the things in the heavens.35 The poem draws together in complex and subtle ways the themes of creation and ‘wisdom’, of Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8, in order to tell the story of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and a...